The invention relates to a CMOS sensor array for sensing an X-ray-produced image such as without limitation being for use in medical diagnosis and as being furthermore recited in the preamble of claim 1. CMOS sensor arrays have many advantages but with larger size the number of column defects will increase. In particular, the metal interconnect in such CMOS devices is sensitive to defects caused by shorts between adjacent metal tracks. With large-area imagers this effect may cause severe yield losses. In fact, shorts between interconnect tracks in the pixel array can lead to complete dead columns and/or rows. It is to be noted that in this application with the word metal not only metals are meant but also other conductors such as conducting compounds like silicides or other conducting materials like polycrystalline silicon.
Now, in various new developments, such as X-ray-photography, the pixel size need not be so small, but may lie at 20, 50, or even 100 microns. This design specification will also allow to increase the metal-to-metal distance. The present inventors have recognized that such in its turn would allow to use redundancy within the cell by only doubling a part thereof and upon detecting a failure, selecting the redundant part instead of the originally used part. In case a defect is detected and the redundancy is activated, the redundant elements of all pixels in the entire row and/or column will be activated. In the above, the notions of horizontal and vertical are exchangeable. Moreover, in principle a geometrical row or column may electrically be divided into sub-columns. Also the control facility may comprise various sub-items, such as selection, reset and other.